SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The Rich Get Richer - Literally

Two-tier education is alive and well in Ontario, as this article from the Real Estate section of The Globe and Mail demonstrates. It seems that Toronto homes in the catchment area of an International Baccalaureate school are selling faster and for more money than homes in other areas. In many cases, the bidders are people from other parts of the world who are seeking an international standard of education for their children.

As is often the case, it’s the well-heeled and savvy parents who score a good education for their children, adding to their already-considerable advantages, while the children of less-affluent and less-educated parents have to settle for whatever comes their way. Current education policies are contributing to the perpetuation of class differences. 

Now That’s Parent Power!

HT to Tunya for this one. After almost 15 years of discussion of advisory school councils and whether or not parents should even be partners in their children’s education, this goes beyond the bake sale and newsletters. How would you like the ability to take your underachieving school and turn it into a charter school or demand that the administration be changed? Well, that’s what is happening in California since a new law called the Parent Trigger law has been enacted.

In California if 51 per cent of parents at an underperforming school petition, they have the power to make significant change to failing schools. That ability is spreading across the country with five more states ready to pass a similar law. The video explains the process for parents and future parents of a failing school how to organize and take action.  Kind of like a union for parents. 

Of course, the California Teachers’ Federation opposes it, with their head calling the parent trigger a “lynch mob provision”.  Forget that parents and students have been more or less held hostage in failing schools for years.

“The concept recognized a truth that school officials often discount: Parents are in the best position to make decisions about what’s right for their kids.”

Now THAT’S real parent power!

Calculators: The Path of Least Resistance

The latest addition to our lending library is The Equation for Excellence: How to make your child excel at math by Arvin Vohra. Math is important because it develops students' ability to analyze and solve problems, apply logic and reasoning, and generally develop cognitive architecture. As the title promises, this excellent book teaches parents the fundamental principles and techniques they can use to make their children excel at math. Written in an easy-to-read style, the book demonstrates how everyone can be good at math, given proper teaching, and shows what parents can do to improve their children's math skills. This excerpt (p. 51) is from the chapter "Incentive and Struggle: The art of developing the mind" and deals with the question of whether or not to give students calculators.

"I have worked with hundreds of high-school students from the best public and private schools in the washington, DC area who can no longer add fractions by hand. They were able to manually add fractions at one time, but after 5 years of chronic calculator use, the skill has completely atrophied. Since students who cannot add fractions by hand cannot do several types of advanced problems (adding rational expressions, partial fraction decomposition, etc.), they eventually find themselves completely stuck and frustrated.

"This principle does not apply only to fractions. In most situations, the mind takes the path of least resistance. It learns the easiest available method to solve a specific problem type, and forgets the rest. The other skills quickly atrophy.

"It is important to note that students do not want their skills to atrophy. Similarly, an athlete who is bedridden for several months does not want his muscles to atrophy. It just happens. The human mind and body do not waste resources maintaining or developing unnecessary abilities."

Another look at Waiting for Superman

HT to Jay Greene's blog for this video from a Taiwan, China animated report on Waiting for Superman.  It is a quite funny interpretation, but an eye-opener as well.

Also, to answer some of the more outrageous comments about the teachers' unions in a previous post, this excerpt from The Cartel director,  Bob Bowdon's column in The Huffington Post provides the REAL meaning to the usual cliches.

       "So when I hear excuses from defenders of the establishment, I can't help thinking to myself, don't they know what the rest of us are thinking? Don't they know how we're finishing their sentences for them?
        There will be the public part of their statement, then the other part they believe, but intentionally leave out.

             • We wanted to be treated like professionals, but we want job guarantees that no other professionals have.
             • We support teacher accountability, provided it virtually never results in actual dismissals for tenured teachers.
             • We should implement policies to prevent burnout of young, hard-working teachers, as long as the most talented, hardest-working teachers are never individually rewarded for the exceptional efforts.
             • We believe in developing fair methodologies of teacher evaluation, but in practice we'll declare that any particular evaluation plan is unfair.
             • We all want to reform public schools, provided reform is defined as 'good for jobs.' 
             • Not enough money reaches the classroom, but we won't publicly criticize excess administration spending because one of those jobs might be ours some day. 
             • We all want better schools, provided that "better for kids" and "better for adults" are never distinguished.

        "And if they do know how the rest of us have been completing these sentences, I've wondered, shouldn't they have been addressing the perceptions of these second halves of the sentences, rather than only repeating the first halves?...

            "Teachers unions just announced that they're going to hold the first ever 'Summit to Stifle Education Reform.'  Or the 'Make it Look Like We're For Reform, While We Come Up With Ways To Kill Reform, Summit.' Okay, I made those up. But they've actually acknowledged the need for a for a big national conference on education reform. Have they finally understood the shifting winds? Have they finally gotten a clue? Or is it a publicity stunt? For more information you can read the announcement.    Excuse my cynicism. But teachers unions have had many years to reform themselves and their approach to education, and they never have. Now we're supposed to believe they're on board? Right. I think it's more likely they'll pass something like a 'Teacher Accountability Plan' that contains 50 new ways to prevent teachers from being held accountable. We'll see" 

So, as Malkin said in her last post, real accountability comes from having a choice.

Less Government, Not More, Is What’s Needed

Yesterday, a member of the Ontario Legislature introduced this private members’ bill to expand the ombudsman’s power to investigate additional government agencies. If passed (and private members’ bills almost never are), the ombudsman could look into parents’ complaints against school boards. This article in the London Free Press discusses the role of London-area anti-bullying groups in encouraging an expansion of the ombudsman’s powers. 

To me, this looks like a real long shot. Even if the bill passes (perhaps a one percent chance), and the ombudsman becomes very active in sticking up for parents whose concerns are being ignored by their school boards (say a fifty percent chance), I strongly doubt that the parents will get satisfaction. The school boards have become very expert at dodging and weaving their responsibilities, and I just can’t imagine that they would all of a sudden change their attitude. And it is highly unlikely that they can be forced into compliance. After all, what could the ombudsman do to them? Fine them? Put them in jail? Make them send their own children to failing schools?

We’ve seen this before. The Ontario College of Teachers was going to deal with bad teachers. School councils and the Ontario Parent Council were going to empower parents. The new curriculum, the reformatted report cards, and the provincial tests were going to make schools accountable. The Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat was going to raise standards. Nothing has worked.

The real road to accountability is to make it possible for parents to withdraw their children from unresponsive schools and transfer them to better schools. Failing schools are unlikely to change unless they are at risk of losing so many students that teaching positions will be lost.

Parents as Partners - Deja vu all over again?

On Saturday, I was asked to participate as a panelist for the plenary session of the People for Education conference.  While I suspected SQE was invited out of desperation, I decided to go anyway - particularly since the conference was going to be aired online by the Ontario government’s education channel TVOntario as a live stream.  It couldn’t hurt to broaden SQE’s exposure.  Outside of the production personnel, I counted about 100 or so attendees in the audience.  Other parents could join in through twittering.

The topic for our session was Parents as Partners. (Sigh & groan)  I remembered attending a similar seminar hosted by the newly-formed Ontario Parent Council about 15 years ago.  How optimistic we were then that school councils could really have an impact on improving Ontario schools.  Well, plus ça change.  P4Ed’s own report shows that school councils are not fulfilling their mandate, which is to monitor student achievement; but that they are mainly fundraising and sending home newsletters.  (Sigh again)  Funny, I don’t recall if their survey asked councils if they were happy with their lot or if they would like to have more say.

There were four panelists, including me, who were asked to discuss the following questions:  Do parents have the right expertise to be partners? Or should we be thinking of parents’ role differently? Some want parents to have more power; some want them to have less - why? What would be the most effective way for them to participate in their schools and the education of their children?  What, if any, role should parents play in areas like curriculum?  (Like I said readers, sigh.)

The academics on the panel were, well as you would expect, “adacemicky” and pretty disconnected with what parents endure.  Only Uzma Shakir, an Atkinson Fellow, told of her condescending experience as a parent who was basically still looked upon as a “cookie baker”—her words, readers. We all agreed that education needs oversight by the Ontario Ombudsman.

Along with many other education reformers, I was there from school councils’ inception as huge supporter of parental involvement via school councils.  In fact, the first time I met Annie Kidder was when we appeared together on TVOntario’s Studio Two to discuss the topic 15 years ago. If I recall, P4ed back then was against them because it was feared “special interests” or that groups of parents could “take them over”.  (Was the fear-mongering correct?) 

I wasn’t expecting a welcoming audience for what I had to say, but my experience is that, because they have no real clout, school councils are looked upon by the system as a necessary evil; the public school system is designed for the interests of the people who work in them, not the students; those who control the money get to run education (guess who?); and there really is no accountability.  We heard from one mom in the audience who was thrilled that her child could attend an alterative school, the Africentric school, and that the parents had a better, but not perfect, relationship there.  (Wonder if she realized how instrumental SQE was in getting the TDSB to look at more alternative schools?)

Ultimately, the answer to all of those questions above, the most effective way for parents to have an influence on their children’s education, is the ability to “vote with their feet” because they have the freedom choose the type of education or the schools their children attend.  In their hearts, I know parents think so too.

Sunday at the Movies (Malcolm Gladwell)

Further to yesterday’s posting about the dangers of external motivation, here is a short clip of Malcolm Gladwell on the importance of passion. As an added bonus, you will learn something a bit surprising about the Beatles and Bill Gates.

The Best Gift of All

There's a fascinating article entitled The Curse of Giftedness in today's Globe and Mail. As the title suggests, we may not be doing our kids any favours by singling them out for being early achievers. For many, the recognition translates into a lot of pressure to do even better - and at some point along the line, the decision to walk away from the glittering goals that were set for them by others. 

The bottom line seems to be that parents and teachers should encourage and support - but not push. Precocious abilities and a buck twenty-three will get you a cup of coffee at Tim Horton's. Real, lasting success (and happiness) come from internal motivation and the willingness to work hard to achieve your goals.

The best gift parents and teachers can give gifted children is room to grow.

The alchemist’s dilemma

George Jonas wrote this thought-provoking column in last weekend's National Post.  In The Alchemist's Dilemma, Jonas points out that if every student gets to university, then the value of that education is diluted. 

"In medieval Europe, alchemists spent an inordinate amount of time trying to turn base metals into gold. It was a foolish quest, not only because it couldn't be done, but because success would have defeated its purpose. Had alchemists managed to do what they set out to accomplish, gold would have become valueless.Something close to it happened to education, I believe. Having discovered the economic value of diplomas, social engineers reacted to it like alchemists reacted to the economic value of gold. Since PhDs earn more money than high school dropouts, they reasoned, why not turn as many high school dropouts as possible into PhDs?

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Perhaps it was, but as a result we've proportionately more job applicants in relation to the post-doctoral positions available today than we've had high-school dropouts looking for agricultural or construction jobs 50 years ago.

Educating people for economic advantage diminishes the economic advantage of education. That's why we see PhDs slinging hamburgers every so often, and can expect to see more as time goes by.

This won't deter the education mill. The paradox of alchemy was equally self-evident, yet alchemy flourished in various periods and places, occupying and preoccupying people of intelligence and ingenuity. It still does. In our day, the alchemist's workshop has become the educator's classroom, where we spend inordinate amounts of time, effort and money in the hope of doing to minds what alchemists once tried to do to metals, turning the base into the precious."

Recent articles in the Toronto Star, coupled with Jonas' argument, seem to speak against encouraging too many kids into going to university.  Jonas also points out the poor preparation of students adds to that dilution.

"One consequence of schools-as-diploma-factories already was evident 50 years ago. Back then, it was still mainly trade schools that concentrated on graduating students instead of educating them. The concept of "social promotion" wasn't yet embedded, but its effects already could be felt."

..."The reason was educational philosophy. The British still wanted to teach students in the 1950s; the Canadians mainly wanted to promote them. In Britain, at the lower end of education, at least -- trade schools, vocational training and such -- the goal was still to make students master the material of the course. In more "progressive" Canada, the main purpose was already to equip students with diplomas and make them feel good about themselves. Half a century later, we're reaping what we've sown."

Seems that when universities increasingly have to run remedial courses for incoming students; when no student fails and almost all are "guaranteed" acceptance into just about any sort of post-secondary institution; when, as a several on this blog have pointed out, standards have to drop to accommodate lack of basic skills (even as one commenter mentioned a disturbing trend in engineering, no less)--then the alchemist produces yellow-coated lead.

Like Mr. Fair, We Want Fairness

Talmadge W. Fair, the chairman of the Florida State Board of Education, has a column in the Miami Herald in which he talks about how well the state's students are doing, attributing their success to the fact that Floridians of all walks of life have access to more educational opportunities than do parents in any other state. However, Mr. Fair is worried about one of these educational opportunities because there is a risk that it will be killed by Washington, DC. 

The program he is worried about is the one whereby the parents of children who are struggling in school are given the money to pay for outside tutoring at the agency of their choice. Nearly 80,000 students took advantage of this program during the 2008-2009 school year. Imagine that!!!!!!!

In Ontario, few low-income parents can afford this sort of remediation for their children, and so the students mostly just get further and further behind until they drop out of school. For higher-income students, of course, it's a different story. It isn't fair.